Cuba in Store for Porn, Protest, and Pop Culture When High-Speed Internet Kicks In This Month

​​In early February, a massive ship belonging to French company Alcatel-Lucent arrived at port near Santiago de Cuba after setting sail from Venezuela. Cuban officials immediately touted its arrival as a "breach" of the United States' 50-year trade embargo. Its cargo? Not oil, food, or weapons but the Internet itself.

For years, Cuba has languished in a maddening digital limbo: 97 percent of Cubans don't have access to the web, and those who do chug along at AOL dial-up speeds slower than el comandante's tennis-ball-wheeled walker. Now, however, the new fiber-optic cable will provide Internet 3,000 times faster than before, enabling 11 million Cubans to routinely surf the net for the first time.

They have no idea of all the shit they are in for. After all, we've been wrestling with the pros and cons of high-speed Internet for more than a decade: from naughty Napster videos to computer viruses. Here's what Cubans can expect.

Porn:
Roughly 12 percent of the Internet is straight-up smut. So, with the Cuban government laying off 500,000 workers, it's a bad time to tap a portal to unlimited American-made pornography. What will happen to production quotas when habaneros start spending their days scouring the net for the latest BangBros episode? Cuba's leadership may be geriatric, but in Internet terms, the country is a horny teenager with a new bottle of lotion and unlimited Wi-Fi. Expect a lot of wasted afternoons.

Protest:
Cuban government censors are no slouches, but even they won't be able to stop the outpouring of criticism, mockery, and -- yes -- unrest that comes with high-speed Internet. "If the cable is activated, I'm sure some of those fibers will reach people like me," popular blogger Yoani Sánchez told GlobalPost in June. We give it two days before the island is inundated with fake Fidel Castro Twitter accounts.

Pop culture:While the arc of history may be long and bent toward justice, the arc of the Internet veers toward chugging Code Red Mountain Dew and incessantly Googling celebrity nipple slips on TMZ.com. Just imagine the flood of juvenile Internet humor that will begin pouring into Cuba when the fiber-optic cable kicks into gear later this month. As it is, the country is a veritable virgin landscape, free of obnoxiously viral cultural memes such as dancing babies, LOLcats, and Bill Simmons.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall when Fidel gets rickrolled for the first time.